THE FROZEN TRAIL
When Purdick realized that the rummaging cripple was not only a camp
thief, but most probably a desperado of sorts, he saw where he had made
a capital mistake in not arousing his two companions while it could
have been done with safety. It was too late now. The man was within
arm’s reach of the two sleeping figures, and he was armed; at least, he
was using a vicious-looking hunting-knife to cut the pack lashings.
Purdick held his breath. The little pencil sketch made by the old
prospector had been put into the envelope containing the Survey maps;
and the envelope, as Purdick knew, had been placed between the leaves
of the mineralogy book for safe-keeping and carriage. The book was
lying beside him, just where it had slipped out of his hands when he
had fallen asleep. Would the thief see the book and look in it?
It seemed useless to hope that he wouldn’t. With the curious perversity
with which inanimate things appear to be endowed at times, the camp-fire
blazed up and a resiny twig made a candle of itself, illuminating the
camp area like a small searchlight. Purdick made sure that the crippled
scoundrel couldn’t miss seeing the book lying in plain sight; the book
and the end of the map-holding envelope sticking out of it; and again he
held his breath.
That, in itself, was unnerving enough, but the sight he got of the
cripple’s face was even more so. He hadn’t noticed the man’s face
particularly when the cripple had hobbled into and out of Mr. Starbuck’s
office in Brewster, but now he saw that it was a perfect mask of sly and
ferocious villainy, and he had a swift and terrifying conviction that
the thief would use his knife murderously if any of his victims showed
signs of awakening.
With that conviction half paralyzing him, Purdick’s heart fairly
stopped beating when he saw Dick Maxwell stretch his arms over his
head and yawn as if he were about to wake up. Instantly the man quit
rummaging and caught up his knife. Little Purdick had never felt so
helpless in all his life. In propping himself against the tree he had
wrapped his blankets around him so tightly that he couldn’t get out
of them without a struggle. None the less, he was drawing his feet up
to be ready for the struggle when Dick rolled over on his side, gave
a snort, and was apparently fast asleep again. The peril was over,
for the moment, at least, and Purdick’s stopped heart began to thump
furiously, hammering so hard that he wondered why the thief didn’t hear
it and spring at him.
In the reaction which was bound to follow a shock like that, Purdick
closed his eyes, and tried vainly for a few moments to fight down
the sickening dizziness that was threatening to blot him out. When
he looked again, the man had seemingly given up the search for the
map. Cautiously, with his knife between his teeth, and one arm thrust
through his crutch to drag it along, he was gathering up the three
rifles and making off with them.
Once more little Purdick fought down a frantic impulse to yell out
to the two sleepers. Without the guns they would be helpless. But he
knew that the cripple wasn’t alone in the canyon; that somewhere, and
probably near at hand, were the two men who had ridden out of Nophi
with him. It was only the thought that the other two might be near
enough to hear his yell and open fire on the camp that enabled Purdick
to keep still at this crisis. But he had to bite his tongue to do it.
While the crippled marauder was crawling away, dragging the three guns
and his crutch, and making hard work of it, Purdick’s resolve was
swiftly taken. Noiselessly he disentangled himself from the impeding
blankets, never losing sight for an instant of the crawling figure
working its way toward the lower narrowing of the park-like opening.
Never had the little fellow so bitterly resented the fate that had
made him undersized and, in a certain sense, a physical weakling. With
Larry’s strength, or even Dick’s, he could have landed upon the back of
the creeping thief and made him drop the rifles.
He had just about made up his mind to try it, anyhow, when a diversion
came. Seen dimly by the flickering light of the blazing twig, the
cripple was stopping beside a great boulder which had some time
fallen from the cliffs on the opposite side of the little river and
rolled across to the intervale level. Little Purdick prayed for a
better light, and got it――just for an illuminating instant; just long
enough to let him see that the man was poking the three guns under an
overhanging lip of the great rock to hide them.
This was better; much better; and as the departing thief lifted himself
upon his one serviceable foot and his crutch to continue on his way
down the canyon, Purdick darted quickly into the shadow of the firs
and prepared to follow.
The pursuit did not take him very far. Less than a quarter of a mile
below the camp site there was another opening in the canyon, with a
little side gulch leading off to the left. In the mouth of this gulch
Purdick saw the glow of a camp-fire, and he could dimly make out the
figures of two men sitting beside it. While he looked, the cripple
hobbled down the trail ahead of him and joined the two at the fire.
Here, so Purdick determined, was his chance to find out what the
desperadoes purposed doing, so he called up all the Indian-stalking
stories he had ever read and crept down upon the camp in the gulch.
Luckily, he didn’t have to be Indian-silent in making his approach.
Woodcraft was only a dictionary word to him, as yet, and twigs would
snap and stones roll under his feet, in spite of all he could do. But
the brawling stream, along the edge of which he was making his way,
swallowed up all the clumsy noises, and in a few minutes he had climbed
to a little thicket of low-growing fir saplings on the gulch side, from
the shelter of which he could both see and hear, and could look down at
a sharp angle into the very heart of the small camp-fire and upon the
men surrounding it.
As he came within listening range, the crippled spy was just finishing
his report.
“No, I didn’t find th’ map; I just took a chance at that,” he was
saying. “One o’ them’s likely got it in his pocket. What I wanted was
the guns, an’ I got ’em. Not that a bunch o’ boys like them would put
up a fight; but without th’ artillery, they can’t, d’ye see?”
“Why didn’t yuh bring the guns in with yuh?” growled the bigger of the
two who hadn’t left the camp-fire.
“Too much trouble. I hid ’em where they’ll never find ’em.”
“Well,” said the big man, “do we go on up and scare the kids out of a
year’s growth? Are you sure they’ve got the map? It was talked around
in Nophi that they was goin’ out hunting f’r tungsten, an’ the like o’
that.”
“Didn’t I see it with my own eyes?” snapped the cripple. “An’ didn’t
I hear Starbuck tellin’ ’em all about th’ Golden Spider? ’Tis a sure
thing, I tell you! This tungsten business is all a frame-up. Starbuck’s
got a safe pointer on that gold mine, and he’s sendin’ the boys because
he figures that nobody’d think a bunch o’ college boys’d be out for
anything but a good time in th’ big hills.”
“Well,” said the smaller of the two fire-keepers, “this is your show,
Twisty. What do you say?”
“There’s only one thing to say. If we could get over Mule-Ear with th’
bronc’s, I’d say, let ’em go on ahead an’ find th’ mine f’r us. But th’
horses can’t make the trail, an’ it thawin’ an’ freezin’ every day,
though the jacks can. We’ll wait f’r an hour ’r so, till the trail’s
froze good an’ hard, then we’ll go up an’ get th’ map an’ the jacks and
their outfit and grub-stake an’ go on.”
“Leavin’ the kids behind, yuh mean?” said the big man.
“Surest thing you know!” barked the cripple. “They’ll find their way
back to Nophi, an’ that’ll be the end of it.”
“But if we leave the horses, that’ll give us away,” objected the third
robber.
“I fixed that before we left Nophi,” said the man with a crutch.
“Barkey Davis’ll be on his way up the canyon at daybreak, and if he
finds the bronc’s left behind, he’ll take ’em back. If he don’t find
’em, he’ll know we’ve gone on. ’Tis all fixed.”
But the third man was still unsatisfied. “We’re too near the town,”
he said. “I know Billy Starbuck, and so do you. Th’ boys’ll get back
to Nophi in a day, and that’ll mean a sheriff’s posse, with Starbuck
headin’ it. It’s too risky.”
“Risky nothing!” was the snapping retort. “’Tis you with a yellow
streak in you, Tom Dowling! How’s thim b’ys goin’ to know who holds ’em
up in the dark? An’ with th’ snow thawin’ every day on the range, who’s
goin’ to trail us over Mule-Ear?” And the cripple spat in the fire to
emphasize his disgust.
Little Purdick had heard enough, and more than enough. In an hour, more
or less, their camp would be raided, everything they had would be taken
away from them, and they would be set afoot in the wilderness to make
their way back to civilization as best they might. Stealthily he began
to back out of his hiding place under the low-growing saplings. Flight,
a swift race back to Dick and Larry with the tremendous news, was the
next number on the programme.
Before he could give himself the first backing shove, Purdick found
that he was shaking with nervousness, and he had to wait for a minute
or two until he could get the trembling fit under control. The little
pause came near proving hideously disastrous. In moving back he had
disturbed a round stone the size of a man’s head, and before he could
grab at it, it had gotten away and was rolling down the declivity. When
it started, Purdick thought it was all over with him; the stone was
headed straight for the fire in the gulch. But in its second turn-over
it struck one of the small trees, was turned aside and went plunging
down the other declivity into the stream at the right.
Purdick flattened himself to the earth until he had a feeling that he
was no thicker than a sheet of paper, and he hardly dared to breathe.
Two of the three men at the fire――the two with sound legs――sprang up
at the noise of the plunge, but the cripple sat still and laughed
raucously.
“Youse fellies ain’t got the nerve of a couple o’ jack-rabbits!” he
sneered. “Did yuh think th’ little sleepin’ b’ys was comin’ down here
to scrag us? ’Twas only a rock rollin’ round in the creek.”
Purdick had his shaking fit well in hand by this time, and once more he
started to back away, testing every rock as he retreated to the stream
level to make sure that it was fastened down before he put his weight
upon it. Once on the trail, and around the first crook in the canyon,
he began to run at top speed――and kept that up for just about twenty
yards――which was all the distance it took to make him understand that
when a fellow has lived all his life at an altitude of a few hundred
feet above sea-level, he can’t run to do any good in the tall hills; at
least, not until his lungs have grown big enough to take in more of the
rarefied air at a gulp.
So it was a pretty badly winded scout who presently staggered into the
upper camp opening and flung himself upon his two soundly sleeping
comrades. Of the two, Larry came broad awake at the first alarm, but
Dick had to be shaken vigorously before he could be made to sit up and
listen to the story that Purdick was gasping out.
“Well, I’ll be dinged!――you good old sleuth!” was Dick’s praiseful
comment, after Purdick had made them understand what had been happening
while they slept. “Played ’possum and didn’t let him know you were
awake? But why didn’t you yell out for us?”
“I meant to, at first, of course,” said Purdick. “But I waited too
long. When he got up right here between you two with that butcher
knife, I was afraid to. What are we going to do? They said they’d wait
an hour or so, but they’re liable to change their minds and rush us any
minute.”
Larry Donovan was the one who knew what was to be done, and he was
already doing part of it. Quickly throwing a handful of twigs upon
the fire to make a better light, he began to roll his blankets and to
gather up the scattered contents of his pack.
“Get busy, fellows,” he said quietly. “If you’ve got it straight,
Purdy, we may have all the time we need to get out of here――or we may
not have.”
“Gee!” gasped Dick, falling upon his own preparations with a rush; “you
mean that we’ve got to tackle the Mule-Ear trail in the dark?”
“It’s that, or a stand-up fight with these plug-uglies,” Larry returned
coolly. “Knowing what we do, I suppose we’d be justified in ambushing
the gang as they come up the canyon, but I’m sure none of us want to
start this summer job of ours by shooting down a bunch of mine-robbers,
much as they deserve it. The other thing to do is to light out before
they get to us. And we don’t have to do it in the dark either; see
there?” and he pointed to a thin crescent of a moon in its last quarter
which was just beginning to show itself above the high eastern
mountain. Then to Purdick, “Purdy, you go and corral those guns, while
I make up your pack.”
Going over it afterward, all three of the boys thought they were well
within the truth in claiming that no camp was ever broken with less
loss of time, even by trained burro-freighters, than theirs was that
night. In a very few minutes the jack-loads were made up and cinched
on the pack saddles, each man’s shoulder-pack was slung, and they were
ready for the trail.
Larry, dropping into place as leader in the flight, gave his final
directions after Dick had brought a hatful of water from the stream
with which to extinguish the camp-fire.
“I was studying the Survey map as we came up on the train, and if I’ve
got the right idea of where we are now, we have a pretty long, hard
pull ahead of us to reach the top of the pass. We must make the best
time we can while the going is good, because we can’t rush much after
we hit the old snow. We’ll let old Fishbait”――they had already named
the two burros――“show us the way. He can find the trail better than we
can. All set? Here we go, then.”
Happily, the up-canyon trail was easy at the start. Beyond the little
park in which their camp had been pitched there were a few narrow
places where the footing at the stream side was somewhat hazardous,
with only the thin moonlight to show them where it was; but very
shortly the gorge widened out into a valley with precipitous, wooded
mountain slopes on either side. Here the trail was broad enough to
enable them to break the Indian-file order of march; and Dick and Larry
made Purdick repeat his overhearings at the camp of the desperadoes.
“Wait a minute,” Dick interrupted; “let’s see if I’m getting it
straight. Were they meaning to leave the horses behind when they came
up to raid us?”
“That’s the way I understood it,” said Purdick.
“Then when they do come up and find us gone, they’ll have to go back
after the horses before they can follow us.”
“Which is lucky for us,” Larry put in. “As long as the trail stays as
good as it is right along here, they can cover three miles to our one.
How far did you say it was from our camp back to theirs, Purdy?”
“I’m no good at guessing distances in a crooked canyon in the dark,”
Purdick admitted. “But it can’t be over a short quarter of a mile.”
“Not much comfort in that,” Larry grumbled. “Did you see the horses?”
“No; but I couldn’t see much of anything. Their fire was built in a
little side gulch and it didn’t shine out into the main canyon, and the
moon wasn’t up, then.”
“Our best hope is that they’re not hurrying about putting the raiding
job over,” was Dick’s contribution to the discussion. “If they’ll only
give us time to reach the bad going――――”
The interruption was the distant crack of a rifle, a single shot that
repeated itself in a series of battledore and shuttlecock echoes from
the mountain sides on either hand.
“What does that mean?” Dick demanded.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Larry. “But if you ask me, I’ll
say it’s a signal. Just for a try at it, suppose two of them have come
up to put the raiding job over. They’ve found the birds flown, and now
they’re telling the third man to come on with the horses. Am I right?”
“I believe you are as right as rain,” Dick agreed quickly. “In which
case?――――”
“In which case, it’s us for the speedway!” Larry exclaimed, and
forthwith he urged the little pack animals into their nearest approach
to a trot.
“If we can’t beat that bunch to the bad going, it’s up to us to make a
fight or get ready to tramp back to Nophi with our tongues hanging out.
Get along, Fishbait! If you only had sense enough to know what’s behind
you, you’d make tracks a lot faster than you’re making them now!”
That was the beginning of a blind race which was made all the more
difficult by the fact that the fugitives never knew a minute ahead what
they were coming to next. If they had been familiar with the trail it
would have been different. But they had to trust wholly to the instinct
of the leading burro, and at times, when the little beast and its pack
mate went plunging through dense thickets of the young trees, they were
reasonably sure they were off the track.
Also, in a very short while the pace began to tell, particularly upon
little Purdick. By the time they reached muddy going, the high, upper
valley where patches of the old snow were showing dimly among the tree
trunks, with leaky rivulets trickling down from them to make a spongy
swamp of the footway, Purdick was gasping for breath and lagging behind
the procession, in spite of all his efforts to keep up.
“Getting next to you, old scout?” said Larry, leaving Dick to urge the
pack beasts on while he dropped back to relieve Purdick of the weight
of his gun. “This is a pretty hard row of stumps to put you into――the
first crack out of the box, this way.”
“I’m――I’m all right,” the small one stammered gamely. “If I――if I could
only――could only get my second wind――――”
“That’s it,” said Larry encouragingly. “It’ll come, after a bit. But if
it’s too hard for you, we’ll let up a few notches. Dick and I are more
or less used to these altitudes, and――――”
“L-l-let up, nothing!” stuttered the game laggard. “Wh-when I can’t
hold up my end you can ch-chuck me into the creek and leave me behind!”
It was the trail itself that presently cut the speed down to something
less breathless. Within the next five hundred yards the spongy swamp
underfoot had become snowy slush, and with another hundred feet or
so of elevation the slush began to crunch encouragingly under their
feet to tell them that they were at least reaching the zone of nightly
frosts.
Here, too, the forests were receding on the approach to timber
line, with steep, snow-covered slopes to take their place, and in
consequence, the light was immeasurably better; so good, indeed,
that they could now see the trail quite plainly, part of the time
as a deeply trodden path between snowbanks, and in other places a
hard-frozen ridge from which the snow, thawing in the June sun, had
sunk away.
It was remarkable how the sure-footed little pack animals were able to
climb steadily, rarely slipping on the icy track, and plodding along at
a walk so fast that it pushed the three boys to keep up with them on
the slippery ascent. It was Dick, who had made one winter trip into
the mountains a couple of years earlier, who cautioned his companions
about the danger of slipping from the trail.
“Look out in these ridgy places,” he warned. “If you slip aside, you’re
a goner; just as likely as not you’ll drop into a drift twenty feet
deep. I did that little thing once, and――――”
Before he could tie anything to the “and,” there was a shout from the
rear, and the place in the trail which had lately been occupied by
little Purdick was vacant.
“Hold up, Larry!――Purdy’s taken a dive!” Dick yelled, and the
procession was halted. On the lower side of the trail, at the spot
where Purdick had been last seen, there was a round hole in the snow
crust. It was neither as deep as a well nor as wide as a church door,
but, like Mercutio’s wound, it served. Down in the bottom of it a
disturbance, much like that in the pit of an ant-lion when that active
little bug is burrowing with its prey, was going on to an accompaniment
of smothered cries.
“Don’t fight yourself to death!” Dick called out. “We’ll get you
in a minute.” Then to Larry: “Grab me by the feet――I’m going after
him”――which he did, head foremost, to be dragged back a moment later,
bringing the buried one with him.
“B-r-r-r!” shivered little Purdick, beating the snow out of his
clothes; “if anybody had ever told me that I was scheduled to take a
snow bath in June――whoosh! it’s all down inside of me!”
“It’ll melt in a little while,” said Dick consolingly. “I’ve been
there, too, and I know how it feels. But we’d better be humping
ourselves. If I’m not mightily mistaken I can hear those horses coming
up the canyon trail right now! Listen!”
They did listen, and there was no reason to doubt Dick’s acuteness of
hearing. Far back along the way they had come they could hear the clink
of horseshoes upon stone; and the horses were evidently being pushed to
their best up-hill speed.
“It’s still up to us,” said Larry. “If we can turn that high gulch
shoulder up ahead before they get out of the timber.... I don’t know
whether they’d go so far as to try to murder us, but as long as we’re
out on the bare snow slope we make a pretty plain target, in this
moonlight.”
That meant more haste, combined with a good bit of uncertainty as
to the result. The trail had now become a winding zigzag up the
snow-covered slope, and until it turned to head into one of the higher
gulches, any object upon it as big as three marching figures and two
loaded pack animals would stick out like a sore thumb against the white
background from any lower point of view at the edge of timber line. So
the question of escape hung once more upon the matter of speed. If they
could disappear in the gulch before the pursuers reached the foot of
the snow slope, the worst would be over.
They made it, finally, though by the narrowest possible margin. Just
after they had urged the blown burros around the projecting rocky
shoulder which hid them, the three panting climbers turned to look
back. Down at the edge of the timber, fully five hundred feet below,
they saw three mounted men push out upon the lower reaches of the
trail. Larry shifted his rifle from his shoulder to the crook of his
arm.
“They’re going to try it, anyway,” he said slowly. “If their horses are
sharp-shod, they may be able to make it. I don’t know but what it’s
going to come to a fight, after all.”
Contrary to everything Larry had ever known of him, Dick Maxwell was
the one who counseled patience and a renewed effort to escape.
“I’d hate to see it come to gun-play,” he said. “It would be a pretty
savage way to start our summer. Let’s not fight until we have to,
anyway, Larry.”
But Larry Donovan was made of somewhat grimmer stuff.
“Goodness knows, I don’t want to kill anybody,” he protested. “But
there’s this much about it, and I’m saying it to both of you. These
wolves mean business. They think they’re on the sure trail of a gold
mine, and we know what we may expect if they overtake us. If they can
make the trail on horseback, as they are trying to, right now, it is
only a question of a little time until they’ll chase us into a corner.”
“Well?” queried Dick. “What have you got up your sleeve?”
“This. As long as we’re climbing the hill, we’ve got the advantage.
We’ll make the pass if we can, and take cover, if we can find any. I
don’t want to kill a man, any more than you do, but if they are still
trying to get at us, we’ll have to take a crack at the horses, in sheer
self-defense.”
That was the way it was left when they resumed their march along the
frozen trail whose windings presently led them so far around the
mountain that they lost sight of the snow slope over which they had
climbed to reach the high gulch. Before they had headed the gulch
to come out upon the bare, wind-stripped slope over which the trail
doubled back toward the pass, the crescent moon which had thus far
lighted them upon their way began to pale in the first flush of the
coming dawn. Just ahead they could see the comparatively shallow
depression in the mountain range which marked their goal, and in a few
minutes more the toiling ascent was accomplished and they stood on the
bald summit of the pass.
It was this last ascent that gave them the elevated view-point from
which they could trace the backward windings of the trail almost all
the way down to the place where it emerged from the timber. In the
increasing dawn light they could make out, far below them, the three
horsemen like black insects crawling along on the snow sheet. While
they looked, one of the insects paused, appeared to dance for an
instant, and then disappeared, and they knew that one of the horses had
slipped from the icy trail to plunge aside into a snowdrift.
“That ought to settle them,” said little Purdick, making a pair of
shades out of his curved hands to shut out the snow glare, as he
watched the struggle going on below. “They’ve still got the worst of it
ahead of them, if they only knew it.”
For a few minutes the three watchers stood motionless, looking on at
the efforts of the two men who remained on the trail to get their
submerged comrade out of the drift. When the thing was finally
accomplished it was at the cost of the loss of a horse. Quite plainly
they saw the freed and plunging animal break its way out of the drift
and paw its way up to the surface of hard-frozen crust, only to lose
its footing and go whirling and sliding down the steep, mile-long
toboggan slide of the slope below, growing smaller and smaller until at
last it disappeared entirely.
Dick Maxwell took off his hat and waved it as the three men on the
trail, leading the two remaining horses, turned and began to creep back
down the path of hazard which had proved so nearly fatal to at least
one of them.
“Good-by, you hold-ups!” he shouted, as if he could make himself heard
over the half-mile or more of intervening height and distance. “Sorry
you’ve lost your nerve, but we’re mighty glad to see the last of you,
just the same. Good-by!”
“Don’t you be too sure about having seen the last of them,” Larry put
in soberly. “If they really believe we can show them the way to the
Golden Spider, and so give them a chance to ‘jump’ it, they’ll not give
up so easily. You must remember that the summer is still young.”
“Summer?” said Dick, with a shiver; “it seems as if it might be
Christmas up here with all this snow.” Then to Purdick, who was untying
the cooking utensils hanging from Fishbait’s pack saddle: “What’s on
your mind, Purdy?”
“Coffee,” said Purdick. “I feel as if I’d been up all night. Which pack
was the solidified alcohol put in?”
Nobody remembered, so there had to be a search made in both jack packs,
since there was no fuel of any sort on the high, wind-swept barren
of the pass. The emergency cartridges were found, after a time, and
Purdick rigged the tripod of the alcohol stove and put a cookerful
of clean snow on to melt. That done, he began rummaging in the packs
again, methodically at first, but a little later with feverish haste.
“Tell us what you’re looking for and maybe we can help you find it,”
said Larry, coming back from a short excursion to the western side of
the pass where he had been giving the downward trail the once over.
“The book,” Purdick answered gaspingly; “the ‘Dana’ with the maps in
it! Which one of you put it away?”
“I haven’t seen it since we left Nophi,” was Larry’s rejoinder; and
Dick also pleaded an _alibi_.
Purdick sank back on his heels and his face was white.
“Didn’t――didn’t either one of you pick it up last night at the canyon
camp and put it in one of the packs?” he demanded.
“Pick it up? From where?” Dick asked.
“Off the ground. I sat up, reading in it, after you fellows had turned
in, and when I dropped asleep it fell out of my hands. It was lying
there beside me while that cripple was going through the packs, and
I was scared stiff for fear he’d see it and see the map envelope
sticking out of it. After that, I never thought of it once until this
minute. It’s gone, and it’s all my fault! I told you two you were
loading yourselves up with a hoodoo in bringing me along, and this
proves it. We can’t make a single test without the ‘Dana,’ or locate
anything without the Government maps. Worse than all, those hold-ups
will probably find the book on their way back through the canyon, and
that’ll end it!”